07/03/09
This one is for you Catholics and others who may have heard about a guy named Christopher West talking about a thing called Theology of the Body on ABC's Nightline a couple months ago. I've really been too busy with my real job and other things to pay much attention to it, but West's appearance on TV has caused an uproar in Catholic blogs and every article about it grows long scroll-downs of comments.
Theology of the Body is a title given to a series of lectures delivered back in 1979-84 by the late Pope John Paul II during Wednesday audiences. Some would say that the church has always had a "Theology of The Body" and that the late pope's theology is but a small contribution to it.
In spite of a few cold, blustery, stormy April days (such as November 4, 2008), there is a new springtime for Catholicism. With increased interest in the faith comes opportunity for opportunists. There is money to be made. All kinds of dotorg and even dotcom "ministries" operated by lay people have sprouted. Such lay operations are new to the Catholic Church.
Those in favor may point to Vatican II and its call for increased involvement of the laity and certainly lay folks are performing services that the clergy are neglecting to, but we are a church set up to be led by priests. To be led by priests is something we should strive for and there's no greater sign of sincerity than to perform a service while making absolutely no money at all.
People who are far more cynical than I am might say that this West business is a spat about who owns the distribution of John Paul II's Theology of the Body in the U.S. On the one side is West who is the popular face of it, turning out books and performing before crowds like a motivational speaker. On the other side is West's former teacher, Pontifical [John Paul II] Institute professor David L. Schindler who also enjoys privileges and profits of being an expositor. There's also Alice Von Hildebrand who says that while she never read JPII's Theology of the Body, her late husband Dietrich gave Karol Wojtyla the idea for it. Dear old Alice. I wish I had a wife who would be ballyhooing me forty years after I'm dead.
What set all the artillery fire off was West giving an interview on TOTB on Nightline. This in itself was a mistake. Talking about religion to the religion-retarded media usually is. The language of TV news shows is the sound bite and TOTB is one of many things that cannot be reduced to witty and pithy remarks. West also didn't heed the first principle of giving interviews: If you do not want something to be reported, if there is is any possiblity that it may be taken out of context, DO NOT SAY IT! He said the words "Hugh Hefner" and that came out of ABC's meat grinder as "Christopher West's heroes are John Paul II and Hugh Hefner."
Kinky to Silly
This exhausted Dr. Schindler's patience with his former student and the professor wrote an editorial (1) that appeared on Headline Bistro, a news site/blog operated by The Knights of Columbus which also funds the Pontifical Institute for Marriage and Family Studies. In it, Schindler lamented that what came out on Nightline was "not inconsistent" with what West has been writing in his books and teaching in his classes. It ranges from kinky stuff--which I won't describe--to downright silly stuff such as West's suggestion that couples bless their genitals before they have sex. Perhaps this is why I saw a guy in a downtown church dabbing holy water in his crotch. Essentially, Schindler writes, West's handling of TOTB puts too much emphasis on sex.
Return volleys were quickly fired by defenders of West who say that he is making Theology of The Body--and the Catholic faith itself-- more accessible to people, particularly young folks raised in today's hedonistic culture, who are not reached otherwise.
How Low Do We Go?
Which raises the question: How low should one go in trying to reach people? How much can one distill a complex teaching before it becomes so distorted, it's misleading and even silly, and dispensing it is a counterproductive disservice? Some people just aren't ready. Jesus himself said "Do not give what is holy to dogs, or throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them underfoot, and turn and tear you to pieces" (Matthew 7:6).
I think that Dr. Schindler has the high ground here and is the one to heed. I add that Theology of The Body is worth looking at but not in the context of a comedy club or revival meeting. If anything, it is best dscussed with the faithful say in a parish-mission preferably conducted by a consecrated guy who wears blacks and a Roman collar and who lives a life of poverty, chastity and humility.
But yet another question is raised: Is Theology of The Body ready to be pushed out? Do the experts themselves really understand it?
For one thing, the TOTB industry has going for over a decade, but a good translation of John Paul II's lectures of 25-30 years ago only came out in 2006.
Another issue is the experts themselves. Yes, some of them are wunderkinder, but while they may be wunderbar, they are still kinder. And they are also products of Theology studies of recent decades.
Even orthodox Theology departments, like all schools any more, teach the latest and further teach the latest as the greatest. Students come out of them fully accepting that the latest is truly the greatest. It may not be. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Theology studies of the past forty-some years have probably not included discussions of such things as the simplicity of God or formal, material, efficient and final causes.
John Paul II is, I think, a great saint and doctor; Benedict XVI may be as well. However some of their interpreters talk as if these two pontiffs, along with a few mid-Twentieth-Century theologians, invented the wheel. In calling TOTB a "kind of theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences, sometime in the third millennium of the Church," Dr. George Weigel, great fellow that he is, also called it "one of the boldest reconfigurations of Catholic theology in centuries." Is Catholic theology something that can be reconfigured?
I'm only asking, but I think that John Paul II did not think of himself as a reconfigurer, an inventor of any wheels. His idea of the "person as relation" may seem radical in a society where individualism prevails, but isn't it a development of the thought expressed by Aristotle and Aquinas that man is by nature social? In writing about the persons of God, Aquinas touched on person as relation.
JP II the Thomist
In the March 2009 issue of New Oxford Review, Dominican Father Brian Thomas Becket Mullady writes in a worth-reading article(2) about TOTB that some of its presenters "do not have an adequate understanding of the philosophy and traditional theology that provide the foundation for the Pope's thinking."
There seems to be a myth that Karol Wojtyla, Joseph Ratzinger and other theologians were, as students, turned off by stuff like Metaphysics and Epistemology and that such hoary, boring, cold material propelled them toward revolutionary theologies. It may be true that Northern European universities emphasize subjectivists Scheler and Kant over Aquinas and that presentations of the Angelic Doctor may not have been very exciting, but as Fr. Mulledy argues, JPII was very much the Thomist.
I, being far from an expert, think that there is evidence of this in "The Person and Love," the second chapter of Karol Wojtyla's 1960 book Love and Responsibility, for instance in passages about the ends of marriage being objective and about how the senses perceive objects.
Well, it's time to stop rambling and wrap this up with a closing thought. For that I turn to an anonymous blogger who brilliantly observed that if there had never been a John Paul II or his Theology of the Body, there would still be a Catholic Church.
(1) Christopher West's Theology of the Body
(2) A Primer, Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body (Subscription)
Copyright 2009 by Neal J. Conway